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Page 1, Page 2 Content Well the MOBA concept is a fun one, part of the reason why it's so popular. And WotW is definitely a truly bite sized adventure. You can blaze through it even with bad RNG. | |} ---- If collecting resources was to be fun, and I'm not convinced it can be in a game which draws people in because of it's action combat, it would have to be a lot more strategic than "just click everything in sight, and maybe focus a little more on one type for a bit". Maybe if you were collecting materials to build strategic structures, ala a RTS, but even then, clicking on something is almost never going to be as fun as DPSing it down. Multiple roles is fine- but who really wants to be the "resource gatherer"? It's like being the PL warrior now. | |} ---- ---- ---- Yeah, caravan guard! I love that one part in an hour when the chompacabras appear and I dps them down in five seconds. Or when I picked up that piece of cheese as we walked past it. Good times! | |} ---- Except it is the players who manufacture the belief that they must binge on the game and consume 1000 hours as quickly as possible, instead of spread out over a reasonable period of time as intended. The game would be more fun and last much longer if they did that. Well good news! The developers of WildStar decided to give players variety, so you can stick to running the ones you enjoy. There are many more play styles and preferences than just yours. | |} ---- ---- Good news for me, bad news for the people who need Malgrave Trail for attunement because most people choose to do other activities once they've jumped that hurdle. Of course if people would stop manufacturing their feelings of frustration and lack of enjoyment we'd have a million subs right now rather than 40k! Problem solved. | |} ---- first rule of design (and i'm a designer): it is never the consumer's fault. devs need to come up with new ways of doing mmorpgs. gw2 tried (and somehow succeeded, at least much more than any wow clone out there), but wildstar was stillborn. the numbers speaks for themselves. and the thread is about "why is it so". | |} ---- It's such a shame MMO players focus on leveling as fast as possible. There's so many things to see, and there's no rush, endgame will be there waiting. | |} ---- blame it on the designers, and have no shame. | |} ---- wait, what ? bad game is bad. too niche ? too demanding ? too hardcore ? too boring ? too linear ? there can be hundreds of reasons, but nobody "manufacture their feeling". well, not ALL the players who left... and god knows there are a lot. take your head out of the sand. check around you... there must be some players leaving. you have to know why they do so (in my case, back last fall it was mostly because of "brick wall, content too hard" and currently its more because of "feels like a chore"). your experience might differ. | |} ---- Make MT required for NOTHING and we have a deal :) Problem is, very few people enjoy the "hang out with the caravan" gameplay, and it wastes an hour you could be doing fun things in the game. | |} ---- Haha yes. I'm being sarcastic. Read the post I quoted and you'll see. My experience did not differ much; I left because of the poor design and I had no faith in the current leadership at Carbine. | |} ---- I'm curious as to how are you a designer of ANYTHING (other than nonsense) since it was established on page 5 that you can't even understand simple things like "proportions" and "range". | |} ---- I happened to like adventures as well.. and yes the groups had optimized it to the point of adventures losing their flavor. Unfortunately one of the darksides of game play is players will always look for the path of the least resistance this is something that cannot be changed its something developers are constantly fighting with in all the mmos. I remember in gw2 getting mad at players for wanting to ditch half the dungeon and go straight to bosses.. I was like whats the freaking point of doing a dungeon if you gonna turn it into a game of frogger. To this day I still have yet to see the other paths in the adventures because getting others to try something different sometimes is like pulling teeth. The choose your own adventure apparently doesn't work well in group enviroments. | |} ---- Really, gotta say I like both Crimelords and Malgrave, Malgrave being my favorite. Anytime I have a guildmate needing to run Malgrave for attunement, I always join in. | |} ---- I'm quite partial to Siege and Malgrave, myself. | |} ---- ---- It's because they're running it for what you get at completion. Item imbuements, attunement, gear drops, and now contracts. The carrot comes from completion and people will get that carrot as fast as possible and then move on to the next carrot. If they can get two rewards in an hour by running content quickly they will do so over getting one reward in an hour by taking their time. Of course if your goal is to actually experience the dungeon or adventure content itself you're going to be looking for a different strategy. Oftentimes people skip content like trash because it is not challenging or fun so much as it is boring compared to the rest of the instance. (I am leaving out the possibility of speed runs, which are another type of game play that people enjoy.) One example of this that immediately comes to mind is the dredge fractal in GW2. The trash mobs are tedious in the extreme, but not very difficult mechanics-wise. | |} ---- lol my guildmates are bearly in GA gear aside from a few and the tanks can put on dps gear and stay in tank stance and we still kill it. haha | |} ---- Pretty much this | |} ---- that can't be changed. so you need to design around this. that is where achievement oriented rewards could help. but now a big issue with wildstar is powercreep making all past content either irrelevant or not fun to go thru even if they put a reward at the end. | |} ---- ---- This is why I've never been a huge fans of MMOs. I hate the carrot on the stick thing. I rather play through the content for the content itself. The carrort is just a nice treat afterwards. | |} ---- The key to preventing this, IMHO, is to ensure that different paths through have different carrots associated with them. Too much of this game is focused on "the more efficiently and flawlessly you run through the content at top speed, the better the rewards are". Is it any wonder that nobody stops to smell the roses when doing so costs your entire group a penalty? | |} ---- Yup. I don't get a better reward from Crimelords if I run a longer path and I certainly don't get anything good by taking paths in Malgrave Trail that have a higher likelihood of losing caravan members. | |} ---- Yeh it gets tedious when players trivialize content. Thats why I was always was a big supporter on the idea of using vanity for motivating players who happen to be into that aspect of the game to go back and farm old content for the purpose of say a weapon skin that only drops there ect. Pets look like their going to help fill this role somewhat..but I think there needs to be more added to this group.. Achievments can help with this but until the achievments get their own private reward system it will only motivate completionists... | |} ---- Achievements should also give something visible in game like a title or armor skin or mount. Vanity at its finest! | |} ---- They do. Almost all Dungeon and Adventure Achievements give you a title when you complete them. Both normal and veteran. | |} ---- True. I'm thinking along those lines if achievements get expanded. For instance, I'm constantly getting achievements for mashing spikehordes or crushing rootbrutes or whatever but I've yet to see a silly title for it. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- lots of good ideas (warplots, telegraph combat etc) lots of bad execution and old school mentality. (and i still think a total revamp of warplots is needed. they should feel epic and not the mini zergs games that they are now). but thats another subject... | |} ---- ---- ---- because.. times are changing. | |} ---- ---- which makes stuff more repeatable. which is a good thing, in a themepark mmo. | |} ---- Not hating on them, I just don't understand the need to "check the boxes" thats all. Edit: Guess I just don't get it. | |} ---- They give people goal and a purpose. Is that clear enough for you? Or still confused? | |} ---- insert Bob Dylan song here | |} ---- ---- There's another thing that MMOs didn't have when they first came out: competitors. So they could ignore most of what most of their players wanted and the players would stay anyway. Those days are over. Also, not everyone does need a pat on the back and a gold star. Only about 15-20% of MMORPG players are completionists who need their achievement list filled out. But that's still 15-20% of your playerbase. That's a lot bigger subpopulation than--for example--the people who need another hardcore raid tier. It's funny you should say that and use that particular justification for your views, because solo content makes you be tank, healer, and DPS all in one. You can't just pick a role and hyperspecialize to know everything about just that one thing. What's more, in solo content if you lose one player the encounter is over because you just wiped. In a raid instance, one player can be AFK the whole time and the group still can go on to beat the boss just fine without him. AND he can still get in line for the loot at the end because he was in the room. So when you think about it, solo content is the place where nobody else will pick up your slack, help you out, or drag your corpse across the finish line for you. You must earn your success there on your own. Sounds pretty tough to me. | |} ---- ---- /grins Welcome to the theme park. Here you walk the course we lay out for you. You may scream and pout but you will experience the content as we decided what is best for you. Enjoy your stay. | |} ---- I grew up in the 70s and a good day was 'nobody tried to kick in my teeth or bash in my skull, and then school got out for the day, and as long as the gunshots were far enough away it was a good evening. ;) But the kids of the 80s-90s were the children of the Babyboomers. My parents had their kids 10-20 years before their peers did... The millennials grew up and a super-bad-day was a day when nobody told you how amazing you were. I work with a lot of millennials in tech now. Its nice to work in one of their companies because they are so used to perks... I get free loot all the time and don't even have to dodge bullets to get into the office anymore (and they roll their eyes when I tell them what San Francisco used to be like). So achievement chasing - that is in their blood. Or at least their upbringing. Helicopter parents and all. I joke with friends now that "when I was a elementary school, the parents locked the door and didn't let us in the house until dinner time - we took care of other people's babies, out on the block corner" and they think I'm just joking... Its a generational change. Sure I grew up rough - but all of us older people grew up in a different mindset than the younger folks. We were a little wilder, a little more hustle, and we had a sense that you earn your victory, or you lose. No gold stars just for coming to class for us. I don't expect millennials to get that. I don't expect them to even believe me. I'll just take the free lunch and complimentary macbook and feel like I'm getting away with something. :P (If you can't spot the tongue in my cheek on this, I don't know what to type in your direction... :wub: ) | |} ---- lol yea;) Well F2P will change that:) Now money talks like it should;) And I will talk with my wallet;) moderator edit: content Edited May 29, 2015 by Chillia | |} ---- ---- ---- Well your language indicated otherwise, since you were criticizing people's need to feel a 'pat on the back' and a 'gold star' which isn't really what achievements, or checking the boxes has to do with. There are some achievements which certainly provide that stimuli, but those are typically high skill or high time investment criteria. There's nothing wrong with the game recognizing that accomplishment, because that's the same ideology that provides us gear rewards from defeating bosses or any other thing provided from quests. It's an inherent principle in what makes these types of games rewarding. W/r/t specifically a list of goals to accomplish, MMOs are a vast play space. In a themepark MMO, you need direction for your players so that they can consume the content. Achievements are one layer of many that contribute to this direction. Conversely, sandbox MMOs don't need this because they provide tools for players to create their own goals. This is the large difference people miss when thinking about the two design styles. Direction vs. Tools. In a more applicable metaphor, if you don't understand why people like achievements you must have never collected rocks or keychains as a kid, perhaps don't collect books or comics as an adult, and generally don't like that type of satisfaction. It seems so common I'm not sure how one couldn't understand, even if they didn't have the same behavior, but it is what it is I guess and there's nothing 'wrong' about that. | |} ---- ---- As a kid born in the 80s who has friends born in the 80-90 i can tell you one thing... We *cupcaking* hate achievements. What we also hate is to spend more time trying to have fun than we do spending time earning money. moderator edit: content Edited May 29, 2015 by Chillia | |} ---- I'm not sure what you want. You say that the easy content is boring and the exciting content is too hard. Personally, I don't think Bet Shiphands are boring, but I guess to each his own. BTW, groups don't wipe on the first boss of STL because "one person messed up". You can easily have two people DIE in the encounter and still get him down. If you are taking an hour to down the boss on normal mode, then clearly no one has done it before, and no one has looked up the mechanics. I could see it taking that long if you are trying to figure out the mechanics from scratch. But beyond that, the boss really isn't that hard. Almost every new player I've run STL normal through with has done nothing but talk about how much fun they were having. So they are doing something right. Even with that, they are in fact nerfing the normal mode dungeons, so you can look forward to that. However, if you nerf the VET dungeons- you are just talking all the fun out of the game. Why would you want to do that? If the easy content is too boring and the exciting content is too hard, it's probably just not a good game design for you (because the excitement tends to come alongside the challenge). But I know lots of people who enjoy shiphands and/or dungeons. | |} ---- Agreed. I absolutely hate *cupcake*ing achievements. 80's represent. | |} ----